Actionable CBFI: Prescriptive Interventional Diagnosis and Interaction-Aware Escalation for Sparse Causal Algorithmic Recourse

arXiv:2608.27821v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Algorithmic recourse tells an individual which feasible actions would change an unfavourable prediction. Feature attribution explains a prediction, but the most important causes are often not the best levers. We propose Actionable Case-Based Feature Importance (A-CBFI), which turns the descriptive decomposition of Localized-CBFI into a prescriptive, interventional diagnosis on a structural causal model. A-CBFI prescribes the cheapest single action when one exists and searches joint actions only when no single action is enough. We show that interventional interaction also arises from path blocking and shared descendants, which model-only interaction indices cannot see, and that averaged interaction scores cancel where additive targeting fails. On ten tabular benchmarks (6,657 recourse queries), A-CBFI was never significantly less successful than an untargeted causal beam search, prescribed fewer direct actions (1.10 vs 1.38) with fewer model evaluations (119 vs 150), and offered substitutable single actions for 68.2% of the queries a single action solves. Success gains appeared mainly where causes are immutable and single actions are insufficient.